IT'S a claim to fame June Richardson wishes she never had and one she is never allowed to forget. Every time a child kills a child, she has the world knocking on her door. This time it's the Jamie Bulger case that has brought back her tragic past.

The killers of the Liverpool boy won new lives yesterday, to be lived out in anonymity, in only the second ruling of its kind in legal history. Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss ruled that Jon Venables and Robert Thompson should be protected when they are released from custody.

The first case where a killer was allowed anonymity was that of the notorious Mary Bell who choked to death Mrs Richardson's four-year-old son Martin Brown.

The law couldn't protect him from Bell's evil hands in 1968, nor could it protect three-year-old Brian House, whom Bell also killed in Newcastle. But for nearly 20 years it has protected the killer and the child she gave birth to 18 years ago.

Mrs Richardson can be forgiven then for thinking yesterday's judgement forgets the plight of the victims. "Again the victims are being classed as the villains and the ones who have done the crime get away with murder," says Mrs Richardson, of Low Fell, Gateshead.

"They've even got new passports, I thought you had to be good citizens to get a passport? The only reason she (Mary Bell) got anonymity was to protect her daughter, and that was due to expire this June. I can see her using this to get a lifetime of anonymity, so she will get away with it again."

The Jamie Bulger case keeps opening wounds never far beneath the surface. Mrs Richardson says: "It's like my life all over again. But at least Mary Bell served 12 years, which was only six per child. Little Jamie wouldn't even be a teenager yet. This is not giving his family time to grieve. If they'd got 25 years that would have given them the time to do it properly and to get rid of the horrible feelings of hate inside."

Mary Bell struck in 1968, at the age of 11, choking the two youngsters to death in an apparently motiveless attack. For three months the authorities did not even realise Martin had been murdered and he was buried in a pauper's grave paid for with £35 his mother borrowed from a friend.

Mrs Richardson had to fight to persuade the police that her son had been murdered and justice would have appeared to have been done when Bell was put away for 12 years. But Mrs Richardson begs to differ, especially when the released Bell reputedly benefited from a £50,000 payout for a book about her life, Cries Unheard by Gitta Sereny.

"In the latest case, there have got to be strings attached to it so they cannot make any money out of this whatsoever," says Mrs Richardson, who runs the Homicide Support Unit on Tyneside and is a member of the North of England Victims' Association. "If we as a society are going to protect them for the rest of their lives, they can't have it both ways."

Mrs Richardson has been campaigning for years for better rights for victims and a Government-funded counselling service, so far with limited success. "I don't honestly think that judges care one iota about victims and their families and I think that should change," she says.

"We remain second-class citizens. The perpetrators are the only ones with any rights. There is one law for them and no law for the victims. The scales of justice remain imbalanced."